Shape & Color
Project Four
The purpose of this project was to explore how shapes and colors can be used to portray powerful imagery. It also allowed us to learn more complex commands in illustrator, such as vectors and live paint.
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For this project, we were instructed to create book covers for a series, either one that already exist or one the students can create. The design required a front, spine, back, and two flaps of a book with requirements of a color palette of 3~4 hues, at most 2 type families, and the same dimensions for all three books.
Background
I chose to create a new series, with three books I’ve really grown to love over the years. All the books in my series portray strong, inspiring women protagonists who go through hardships — whether its political oppression, racial discrimination and slavery, or dictatorship. The three books are The Blue Line by Ingrid Betancourt (2017), Kindred by Octavia Butler (2009), and In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez (2010).
Final Product
Sketches
The idea behind these designs was to convey the two (four, in the case of the last book) different versions of the main female protagonist(s). I wanted to convey how the reader can observe the difference between the two selves of the main character in different situations. In The Blue Line, Julia can see into the future and her “job” is to prevent the terrible events she sees from occurring. As she grows older, she becomes more mature and skilled at it, but faces different kinds of horrors — from giving birth in a jail cell to raising her son alone to finding that her husband was having an affair, the difference between the younger and older Julia and very apparent. In Kindred, Dana is an African American writer living in California. However, she somehow travels back in time to the Antebellum South, and is forced to work as a slave. As a slave, she is whipped, sexually assaulted, and of course, pushed to work intensively. The freedom she has as a writer and a slave is on both sides of the extreme, so I wanted to covey the difference. Finally, in In the Time of the Butterflies, four sisters, Maria, Patria, Minerva, and Dede fight to overthrow the dictator in Dominican Republic. Although they are sisters, their beliefs and contributions to the movement vary immensely, and so I wanted to covey their different personalities.
For these designs, I thought of different symbolic elements in the book. In The Blue Line, because Julia tries to prevent tragedies in the future, she constantly changes the fate of events. Therefore, I portrayed a ribbon to symbolize the future — the dark shading represents the tragedy that would have happened, the loop represents Julia intervening to try to prevent it, and the lighter shading represents the better outcome. For Kindred, I used a fire because it is a constant theme throughout the book. For example, one of the first times Dana traveled back in time, she actually saves the plantation owner’s son from a fire. This is contrasted with the fact that he ends up dying from his house burning down, many decades later, which ended Dana’s episodic time travels. Since these two events mark the beginning and ending of Dana’s experience in the South, it is a significant symbol for the book. Finally, in In the Time of the Butterflies, the sisters are referred to as “the Butterflies” (historically, too) because they try to free the Dominican Republic from the cocoon-like restrictions the dictator has placed on the citizens. As butterflies go through such a transition to finally reach the epitome of beauty and freedom, this symbol is very fitting for the Mirabal sisters.
In these designs, I tried to represent the novels in hand shapes, to demonstrate actions that the protagonist(s) took in each book. In The Blue Line, Julia’s grandmother told Julia that she had to keep her ability to see the future a secret because people would probably not believe her and tell her that she’s crazy. Therefore, Julia didn’t tell anyone her secret unless she needed to convince someone that they were in danger. This is important to the story because not even her husband knew that she had this ability, which kept her pretty isolated from everyone around her. For Kindred, I used the anti-slavery symbol because Dana tried to give slaves as much leeway as she could. She would teach them to read and write, give them hope to stand up against their owners, and fight for better standard of living. Although this often got her in trouble, she never stopped rebelling against her owners to give slaves more rights. Finally, for In the Time of the Butterflies, I used four fists to represent each of the sisters fighting for democracy. In true revolution form, the Mirabal sisters led protests, acquired weapons, and spoke to fight for the rights of the people. Although their bravery got them killed, their efforts were impactful and others carried on their legacy and overthrew the dictator.
Digitalization
This was the original design that I presented at the mid-critique. Although a lot of peers liked my graphic style, they expressed that the symbols were not that intriguing, and that they could not really understand the important of them without reading the summary on the back. They also commented that my typeface choice for the summary made it difficult to read, which in this case was really important since they needed the summary to understand the design.
This is the design that I ended up choosing to explore in, because these images are way more powerful, and the fact that these novels all have strong, women protagonists was the reason why I picked these books to be a part of a series in the first place. I also love the emphasis on how different situations bring out different aspects of people, and there are multiple dimensions to everyone. These design covers convey a profound message of how the experiences we go through shape the way we are, and how different people are affected in different ways by the same circumstances.
